As Russian-backed rebels scored another victory is Eastern Ukraine Thursday, two giants of 20th-century geopolitics issued separate warnings about the crisis, suggesting it could evolve into a deeper, direct conflict between the United States and Russia with dangerous consequences.

Testifying at a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Henry Kissinger, an ardent Cold Warrior who was Richard Nixon’s main foreign policy advisor, stopped short of endorsing a call by the committee chairman, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, to provide defensive weapons to Ukraine’s military as it battles Russian-backed separatists.

“I’m uneasy about beginning a process of military engagement without knowing where it will lead us and what we’ll do to sustain it,” the 91-year-old Mr. Kissinger said.

Mr. Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates, said Ukraine should be an independent state and Russian troops should be withdrawn.

“But I believe we should avoid taking incremental steps before we know how far we are willing to go,” he said. “This is a territory 300 miles from Moscow, and therefore has special security implications.”

Meanwhile, former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev told Russia’s Interfax news agency that the West had “dragged” Russia into a new Cold War, one that risked outright confrontation.

“I can no longer say that this Cold War will not lead to a ‘Hot War.’ I fear that they could risk it,” he was quoted as saying.

Mr. Gorbachev was one of the architects of the peaceful dismantling of communist rule in Eastern Europe.

He has increasingly sounded ominous warnings about the path events are taking in Ukraine. Earlier in January, he reportedly told a German magazine that he feared a nuclear confrontation was possible if things begin to escalate.

“The statements and propaganda on both sides make me fear the worst. If anyone loses their nerve in this charged atmosphere, we will not survive the next few years,” he said.

“I do not say such things lightly….I am a man with a conscience. But that’s how it is. I’m really extremely worried.”

DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty ImagesPro-Russian separatist soldiers stand guard at a checkpoint in Enakieve, 25 kilometers from the eastern Ukrainian city of Debaltseve, on Jan. 29, 2015.

More than 5,100 people have been killed in the bloody conflict. Ukraine accuses Russia of aiding the separatists while Russia says the West is behind Ukraine’s attempts to retake the rebel-held areas.

On Thursday, Ukraine’s military conceded that its forces had been overrun by rebel forces in another town in their battle to hold onto a strategically valuable railway hub.

A soldier wounded in combat for the town, Vuhlehirsk, said armoured vehicles and tanks were used in the attack on government positions, forcing a hasty retreat.

The loss of full control over town will further complicate efforts to resist the onslaught on Debaltseve, a nearby railway hub that sits between the two main rebel-held cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

While clashes in east Ukraine rage, hopes are still being invested in reviving a peace process that has been undermined with every new day of fighting.

In Washington, much of the hearing seemed like a flashback to the 1970’s and 1980’s, as Mr. Kissinger was joined by two other elder statesmen — former Secretaries of State George Shultz, who served under President Ronald Reagan, and Madeleine Albright, the top diplomat in the Clinton administration — to offer their views of national security strategy.

Mr. Kissinger, who showed up with his right arm in a sling, was briefly shouted down by a protester accusing him of war crimes from the Vietnam War.

“Get out of here, you low-life scum,” Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, told a protester before the hearing started.

The winner of the US$75,000 international Cundill Prize for Historical Literature is Gary J. Bass, for The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide. Bass was presented with the award at a ceremony in Toronto on Thursday.

The Blood Telegram describes, for the first time, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s secret complicity in the atrocities Pakistan committed against the people of Bangladesh in 1971, sparking the Indo-Pakistani war and impacting the continually unfolding conflicts in Asia today.

Related

In a statement regarding his win, Bass asked that we all remember this incident as an important chapter of the history of the Cold War. “Every reader will judge Nixon’s and Kissinger’s actions in their own way,” he said, “ it’s not up to me to dictate what they should take away from it, but at least they should be aware of the core facts, and then we can have that debate properly.”

Richard Overy and David Van Reybrouck were also finalists for the prize, for The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45 and Congo: The epic History of a People, respectively. Each will receive US$10,000.

Bass was awarded by prize jurors David Frum, a senior editor of The Atlantic; Marla R. Miller, a professor and director with the University of Massachusetts’s history program; Stuart Schwartz, the inaugural winner of the the Cundill prize in 2008, and a professor of history at Yale University; Thomas H. B. Symons, the fouding president of Trent University; and Althia Raj, Huffington Post Canada’s Ottawa Bureau chief.

The Cundill prize, the richest and most important award internationally for historical nonfiction, is administered by McGill University’s Dean of Arts, and is supported by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Peter F. Cundill established the award in 2008.

Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Shock! Horror! Hold the front page — Susan Rice does not do warm and fuzzy.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is blunt and uses undiplomatic language, critics say.

This week she summed up a French/African-backed plan to retake control of northern Mali from Islamist terrorists linked to al-Qaeda thusly: “It’s crap,” she told a gathering of UN-based officials.

It telling it as she sees it, she follows in the footsteps of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and UN ambassadors Richard Holbrooke and John Bolton. Bolton won so few friends in Congress with his take no prisoners approach, George W. Bush had to sneak through the appointment during a recess, after the Republican-controlled Senate refused to nominate him.

But the far-right moustachioed blowhard had too short a fuse to be considered for secretary of state, the post Rice is tipped to fill in Barack Obama’s second administration. Unless he tires of the fight and names John Kerry instead.

Lloyd Groves at the Daily Beast believes Rice is being subjected to an immutable law of the Washington power grid.

[I]n the rough and tumble of political combat, personality trumps policy. Government policy, especially foreign policy, is rife with nuance and complication. But personality is easier to grasp and harder to shed … Rice’s personality—or “temperament,” in the parlance of her Beltway critics — is increasingly front and centre. She is frequently described in the press with such adjectives as “brusque,” “aggressive,” and “undiplomatic in the extreme.”
It is highly unusual for someone who hasn’t even been nominated to be targeted in such wounding terms by enemies and detractors. But personality quirks can loom large in the process, says the Senate’s official historian, Donald Ritchie. Presidential nominations have foundered on smaller factors than Rice’s alleged foibles.

David Rothkopf, a former colleague, defends Rice in Foreign Policy magazine.

The nonsense that she is somehow not qualified for the job is indefensible. Her White House, State Department, and UN experience is the equal of that of many of her recent predecessors, including Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and, arguably in foreign-policy terms, Hilary Clinton.
As for her temperament, raising it is pure sexism. Why is she called abrasive, when clearly, similar toughness was hailed in our most powerful and respected secretaries of state — from Henry Kissinger to George Shultz to James Baker? All had their battles. Even reputedly smooth diplomats like Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher could be all elbows behind the scenes.

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Ruth Marcus believes Rice’s problem is she does not fit the current image of a powerful woman.

The model of female leader has morphed from Iron Lady to soft power. And the controversy over Rice stems in part from the fact that she does not fit comfortably into this model of collegial, nurturing, division-healing woman.
The adjectives used to describe her are fraught with sexist undertones. Blunt. Sharp-elbowed. Driven. Egotistical. Some of these terms come from her friends. No one thinks she would win Miss Congeniality …
Let’s face it: Society has more tolerance for men behaving badly than for women.
Men with inflated egos and problems working well with others can get dinged — see Richard Holbrooke, to whom Rice famously flipped the bird at one meeting and whose outsized personality interfered with his ambitions. Women are granted even less space for bad behaviour or foul language.

Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian wonders why there’s been no serious scrutiny of Rice’s record, including her fondness for war and African tyrants.

Rice’s statements [on Benghazi] were inaccurate, but in a majestic display of intellectual dexterity, progressive pundits claim with a straight face that public officials should be excused when they make false statements based on what the CIA tells them to say, while conservatives claim with a straight face that relying on flawed and manipulated intelligence reports is no excuse …
It goes without saying that if this were Condoleezza rather than Susan Rice, the two sides would have exactly opposite positions on whether these inaccurate statements should be held against her … But what is remarkable is how so many Democrats are devoting so much energy to defending a possible Susan Rice nomination as Secretary of State without even pretending to care about her record and her beliefs. It’s not even part of the discussion.

The man responsible for no less an achievement than establishing the current world order is in Toronto today. And Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State in Richard Nixon’s White House, and formal or informal international affairs adviser to every president since, has come to tell us what he’s wrought. Forty years ago, Kissinger’s tact and tactics coaxed open the tight diplomatic doors to Red China, setting the stage for its rise to the world’s second largest economy. China has leveraged its growing fortune to build its military muscle to the top ranks. On Friday evening, Kissinger will take part in the Munk Debates, arguing whether the dawning century “will belong to China,” and therefore, not to the West.

Kissinger, perhaps surprisingly, will take the contrary stand. He has just released a 530-page analysis of, and the Middle Kingdom: On China. It offers a panoramic view of key landmarks in Chinese history, philosophy, culture and strategy from before the Common Era till now, essential, he argues, to understanding China today. If the 21st century is indeed a Chinese one, Kissinger knows that it was he, arguably more than anyone else, who made it so. And yet in his book, and comments he’s made since its release he argues for a more utopian future, where China and America bestride the world together, as dual powers, cooperatively. Peaceful.

“Relations between China and the United States need not — and should not — become a zero-sum game,” he writes. “When Premier Zhou Enlai and I agreed on the communiqué that announced [my] secret visit, he said: ‘This will shake the world.’ What a culmination if, forty years later, the United States and China could merge their efforts not to shake the world, but build it.”

Such idealism sounds strange from a man famous for his steely-eyed commitment to realpolitik; his seeming acceptance of bloodshed in East Timor, Angola, South Africa, Chile, Pakistan and elsewhere as the justifiable byproduct of reasonable national pursuits always suggested a particularly tragic worldview (natural for a refugee from Nazi persecution). But four decades after midwifing China’s re-emergence as a dominant power, he may have little choice: no one wants to wear the blame for a new Cold War, let alone a hot one.

Kissinger’s plan to reach out to China is generally heralded as wise, even prophetic. Joshua Eisenman, senior fellow in China studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, isn’t so sure. The maneuver helped get Nixon re-elected, and out of Vietnam, while tilting world balance away from the Soviets, but at some cost. At the time, Eisenman recalls, China was weak, diplomatically isolated, economically stagnant, and torn internally by factional struggles within the Communist Party.

“It’s tough to look back and Monday-morning-quarterback,” he says. “But Nixon went to China after the worst of Mao’s Cultural Revolution had subsided and Beijing was under huge Soviet pressure. In 1972, as Kissinger and Nixon toasted the architects of the madness, including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, the Chinese people were really suffering.” The Democracy Wall movement was just a few years away.

By legitimizing the Cultural Revolution rather than condemning it, Eisenman says, Washington could be considered complicit in its cruelty. The Chinese people have a long history of overthrowing dynasties; there is reason to wonder if, had it not been for Kissinger’s friendly call, and the license and lucre he offered, a new upheaval may have happened already. Save for the tiny fraction of the country belonging to the single, ruling party (about 78 million in a country of 1.4 billion), Chinese people have paid dearly for the deal. Americans, having borrowed their country into peril to support a manufacturing competitor, and a potential geopolitical rival, haven’t exactly come out big winners in the arrangement either.

There are riots spreading across China today, despite the Communists’ paranoid ban of jasmine, fearing the plant may spread revolution. People are setting themselves on fire. The New York Times reported this week on widespread lead poisoning in Chinese kids, from flagrant industrial pollution. The environmental impact of China’s magnificent Three Gorges Dam is so enormous it appears to have erased species and triggered earthquakes. This is a regime that imprisons Nobel laureates. There is evidence it butchers minorities for the organ trade. It spends more monitoring its citizens than on national defense.

Kissinger has been criticized for glossing over the brutality of China’s regime in On China. One common accusation is that his business interests — his consulting firm counsels corporations on working in China — demand this. But Kissinger has always shown some sympathy for the Maoist outlook: that, across millennia, the rise and fall of states is the story; a few million murders, a footnote.

Those may be values Kissinger can live with. Can Americans? As long as the Communist party runs things, there will be tension, says Charles Horner, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate. There is, he believes, a fundamental chasm in values that won’t be easily bridged by the trust-building and strategic diplomacy Kissinger imagines.

“You cannot run a one-party dictatorship and have respect for rights as we understand them,” he says. “So long as there is a regime in China whose central purpose, whose reason for being, is the preservation of the monopoly of power, there can be no reconciliation at the level of principle or of warmth or of good feeling.” Americans want a world that is safe for multi-party liberal democracies; the Communists want one safe for one-party dictatorships. These are not the makings of an auspicious alliance.

Look around, Horner says: no one is marching for Chinese-style rule; protesters aren’t demanding Internet censorship. America’s friends are everywhere; China is introverted, secretive, paranoid, and lonely. If Kissinger worries that mounting mistrust and suspicion between the U.S. and China portends a troubled future, it’s with good reason: he himself arranged a marriage between Americans and autocrats that may never have been meant to be.

Henry Kissinger took a lot of heat for disturbing remarks he made on a 37-year-old tape recently released by the Nixon presidential library. The controversy apparently failed to disturb the White House, however, as Kissinger was invited to rub shoulders with a bevy of celebrities and political heavies at a state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday.

Kissinger’s remarks on the tape, in a White House conversation with President Nixon, appear to dismiss both the Holocaust and Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger says on the tape. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Kissinger apologized for the remarks, but failed to mollify some critics. Menachim Rosensaft, writing for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, called it a “reluctant quasi-apology” that came only after Kissinger first tried to justify his words. Christopher Hitchens wrote: “It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity.” Fox News reported:

“Henry Kissinger can apologize but he cannot erase the historic horror of his comment. He can explain it away, but he cannot make his new legacy go away,” said Edwin Black, author of the newly released “The Farhud,” a book that details the history of Arab violence against Jews and eventual Arab-Nazi collaboration.

Black said Kissinger, whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust, has now defined himself as “the archetypal assimilationist Jew” who could never help his people because he hid behind immoral platitudes.

Kissinger turned up at the state dinner with his wife, Nancy, and chatted with Mr. Hu and singer Barbra Streisand, apparently a favourite of the Chinese president. Kissinger, like President Obama, is a winner of the Nobel peace prize. Mr. Hu has the current winner locked up in jail as a dissident. Maybe Kissinger’s presence was Mr. Obama’s subtle way of making the point. Or maybe not.

HandoutBUFFALO, N.Y. — Tyler Ennis scored two goals and Jhonas Enroth made 34 saves to lead the Buffalo Sabres to a 6-4 victory over the Ottawa Senators on Sunday.
<!--more-->The game was played hours after former Sabres great <a href="http://sports.nationalpost.com/2011/03/13/former-sabres-great-rick-martin-dies-in-car-accident/&quot; target="_blank">Rick Martin died in a one-car accident</a>. A moment of silence was observed in honour of Martin, a member of the Sabres’ famed French Connection line.
Thomas Vanek and Paul Gaustad both had a goal and an assist, and Nathan Gerbe and Brad Boyes also scored for Buffalo, which moved into seventh place in the Eastern Conference, tying the idle New York Rangers. Buffalo and New York are four points up on Carolina and six ahead of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Atlanta Thrashers.
Each Sabres player wore a helmet sticker featuring Martin’s name, his uniform number 7, and a fleur-de-lis. The coaching staff wore the sticker on their lapels.
Jason Spezza scored twice and had two assists for Ottawa, which went 3-1 on its four-game road trip but couldn’t match a season-best, four-game winning streak. Colin Greening and Erik Karlsson also scored for the Senators.
Buffalo scored twice in a 33-second span early in the second period to take a 4-2 lead and send goalie Craig Anderson to the bench. Anderson stopped 13 of 17 shots, and backup Curtis McElhinney made 14 saves.
Ennis scored 97 seconds into the second period, breaking a 2-2 tie on a sharp wrist shot from the right circle. Gaustad then banged away at a rebound to give Buffalo a two-goal cushion.
Spezza got the Senators closer midway through the frame when he banked in a shot from behind the net off goalie Jhonas Enroth for his second goal. It was Spezza’s second multigoal game of the season and first since Nov. 9 against Atlanta.
Gerbe made it 5-3 when he scored with a slap shot from the left circle with 5:26 left in the period.
Boyes pushed the lead to three in the third period while trying to deliver a backhanded pass from the left circle to Jason Pominville, who was ready for an easy tap-in. The puck crossed the goal line before Pominville made contact.
Ennis gave the Sabres a 1-0 lead 5 1/2 minutes in when he took a pass in the slot and deked to his left before easily backhanding the puck behind Anderson.
Three minutes later, Spezza scored on the power play, swiping in a loose pack from behind Enroth, who couldn’t completely control a rebound.
With 7 1/2 minutes left, Vanek converted a breakaway after he got behind three defenders at the blue line and took a lead pass from Gaustad.
Then with less than two minutes left, Colin Greening backhanded a shot through Enroth’s legs to force a 2-2 tie.
<strong>Notes:</strong> Buffalo went 5-1 against Ottawa. ... Gaustad came back from a one-game injury absence. RWs Drew Stafford and Patrick Kaleta remained out with lower body injuries. ... Ottawa netted a power-play goal for a third straight game, the third time this season it has posted a streak of that length. ... Buffalo played its first home game after a 4-2-1 road trip and will be home for six of its next eight. ... Spezza has scored in back-to-back games for the second time this season. ... The Sabres have scored first in five straight games and 10 of 11.

I’m no fan of realpolitik. Although born and schooled in Europe, I prefer American-style idealism to European-style pragmatism in international affairs. Paradoxically, I find idealism more realistic than pragmatism. Idealists notice the Pope’s divisions, unlike confirmed pragmatists, such as Stalin.

I’ve never been an unreserved admirer of Dr. Henry Kissinger. Detractors who call him a war criminal are wrong, though. If anything, he’s a peace criminal. I’d prefer to see him pilloried for his Nobel Peace Prize-winning diplomatic triumphs — America’s China policy and its rout in Vietnam — rather than for his crude and insensitive, but not inaccurate, newly released exchanges with Richard Nixon.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger said to Nixon on March 1, 1973. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

A person needs to be tone-deaf to say such things even in private. Saying them in public makes him unfit for office. Had Kissinger known he was being taped, would he have done it?

It’s impossible to say, but he might have. Although last month he apologized for his choice of words, I doubt if the remark seemed anything but self-evident to him even in retrospect, let alone at the time.

These lines may affect Kissinger’s legacy more adversely than any he ever uttered; yet substitute the word “minorities” for “Jews,” and “massacres” for “gas chambers,” and the observation will strike people as merely factual. “If they massacre minorities in the Soviet Union, it’s not an American concern.”

Outrageous? That’s another word for history.

All nations conduct their foreign policies in what they perceive as their own interest.

Influencing the emigration practices of other nations is rarely among any country’s policy objectives.

International reaction to nations massacring their citizens seldom goes beyond diplomatic protests. (Mistreatment of minorities may serve as a casus belli to mask other reasons for intervention — the U.S. Civil War being an example — but that’s a different story.)

Polemicists who feign outrage know this better than anyone. They’re using Kissinger’s remarks as their own casus belli against him.

Related

Kissinger’s comments to Nixon weren’t even particularly Machiavellian. Putting national interest ahead of humanitarian concern has been the foreign policy of most powers throughout history. Nations may misperceive their interests and often do, but this doesn’t alter the fact that it’s their interest they try to pursue. Hypothetical Soviet gas chambers wouldn’t be President Nixon’s concern any more than actual German gas chambers were President Roosevelt’s concern when policy choices had to be made. The priority went to what was seen, rightly or wrongly, as the war effort. Dresden was bombed; the railways to Auschwitz weren’t.

Nixon’s foreign policy maven has always been proud of his Metternich-influenced ideas and flaunted them freely. One can find more chilling examples of realpolitik in Kissinger’s own books than in the newly released tape recordings of megalomaniacal presidential pathology.

The Nixon administration’s geopolitical strategy was nothing short of grandiose. As Kissinger describes it in the concluding volume of his memoirs: “Our strategic objective was … to transform the two-power world of the Cold War into a triangle and then to manage the triangle in such as way that we would be closer to each of the contenders than they were to each other, thereby maximizing our options.”

The conventional view is that this policy fatally weakened Communism by dividing the monolith. My own view is that it may have had the opposite effect. Whatever harm Kissinger’s rapprochement with the Forbidden City had done to the Kremlin, it has allowed Communism to survive in China, instead of perishing along with Soviet-style Communism 20 years later.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Kissinger’s principal legacy has been America’s ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam. His 1973 cease-fire, his “peace with honour,” was in many ways the sacrifice of a principle (as well as a vulnerable ally) to realpolitik. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho shared a Nobel Peace Price (the Vietnamese negotiator at least had the good taste to refuse it) while thousands of South Vietnamese shared imprisonment, torture, death — and ultimately a Communist system that persists to this day. In contrast, the naive American idealist Ronald Reagan’s legacy has been the collapse of the Evil Empire: The demise of this century’s deadliest tyranny that was the scourge of one-fifth of the world and a grave threat to the rest.

As the Evil Empire drowned in Europe, it might have dragged the Evil Empire in the Far East down with it, had clever Dr. Kissinger not helped to cut Beijing loose from Moscow. If so, saving a Mao-jacketed tyranny to fight another day may turn out to be the most insidious legacy of Kissinger’s realpolitik. In the 21st century, the very success of Kissinger’s strategy may come back to haunt us, as a gigantic and reinvigorated China emerges to threaten the Pacific region as well as the rest of the world. There is such a thing as being too clever by half.

National PostOntario Provincial Police have confirmed that remains found in a wooded area in Caledon Sunday morning are in fact human.
Constable Jonathan Beckett of the OPP's Caledon detachment said the remains were discovered in a forest on the north side of Beech Grove Sideroad, about 10 kilometres from Orangeville, by a resident out for a walk shortly before 9 a.m.
A coroner arrived on scene earlier today and determined that the remains are human. An area near the intersection of Beech Grove Sideroad and St. Andrew's Road in Caledon remains cordoned off.
"The OPP forensic identification unit is presently on scene and is assisting with this ongoing investigation," said Const. Beckett. "The identity and sex of the individual will not be released pending the results and positive identification of the deceased person."
<!--more-->
Police say a post-mortem will be conducted at the office of the chief coroner in Toronto in the coming days.
The discovery comes six days after 42-year-old Orangeville resident Sonia Varaschin was <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/09/03/police-seek-missing-orangeville-womans-bedding/&quot; target="_blank">reported missing</a> after she failed to turn up for work Monday morning. Her blood-stained white Toyota Corolla was discovered later that day in a laneway in downtown Orangeville. Police later found a trail of blood surrounding her Spring Street townhouse.
Const. Beckett says the OPP contacted the Varaschin family Sunday regarding the discovery of the human remains. The family has asked for privacy, he added.
On Friday, police issued a public appeal asking for residents to keep an eye out for blood-soaked bed sheets they believe were taken from her home. They also asked the public to try to recall whether they saw anyone with unexplained blood on their clothing or shoes on Monday.
Police said they believe Ms. Varaschin was alone at the time she was likely attacked, and was taken from her home in her own car.
<em>National Post</em>

A lot has happened in 2010. From the Vancouver Olympics, to the Gulf Oil Spill, important elections in the U.S. and many Canadian cities, to the WikiLeaks story that has been dominating the headlines as the year comes to a close. All these events and news makers has meant that there was no lack of stuff to talk about over this past year. And here at Full Comment, we pride ourselves on having some of the country’s most innovative thinkers writing about the most pertinent issues of the day. Based on the traffic they produced, here are the 10 stories of 2010 that produced the most interest among Full Comment readers.

10. The Wikileaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables was one of the biggest stories of the year and will continue to make headlines into 2011. These documents give us a rare look at the secret workings of the State Department and expose countless instances of government corruption, such as the fact that they’re using diplomats in Canada to act as taxpayer-funded television critics. This has led to startling new insights about Canadian society. For example, did you know the CBC has a left-wing, anti-American bias? What is this world coming to? John Ivison had all the juicy details.

9. Voter discontent in the United States led to Barack Obama and the Democrats taking a thumping in the midterm elections. Conrad Black agreed that America was in deep trouble and that Obama was not the man to fix it. But he had some ideas of his own about how to curb the demise of the American empire and restore it to greatness.

Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesThere's no need to pout Mr. President, we're sure some people still love you.

8. Mexico continued to establish itself as a leader among vacation spots for Canadians seeking to escape the winter, and as one of the world’s most dangerous countries. After yet another series of unsolved deaths, Kelly McParland discussed the amazing ability of Mexican authorities to let corpses pile up while failing to pinpoint those responsible or do anything to or act on the causes.

7. Kelly McParland also noted that among the allegedly shocking details of the Wikileaks release were revelations that Silvio Berlusconi is a dirty old man and that Vladimir Putin likes parading in front of cameras with his shirt off while running Russian like an old-fashioned dictatorship. Oh, and Afghanistan’s Karzai government is corrupt. Wait … you already knew that? Well, at least now you know that diplomats think the same way.

Mike Segar/ReutersResidents of New York City could use some global warming right about now.

6. Huge winter storms in Canada, the U.S., and Britain, along with record cold temperatures across Europe, have been making headlines this holiday season. Still buy that global warming thing? No? According to Lawrence Solomon, neither do as many scientists as the IPCC would have you believe.

5. Here in Canada, we had some important municipal elections. First, the country seemed astonished that Calgary would actually vote for a liberal-leaning intellectual. Shortly thereafter, Torontonians defied the conventional wisdom that it’s impossible to elect a conservative in the GTA, by electing Rob Ford mayor. This left a large number of latte-sipping, granola-eating, bicycle-riding, downtown Toronto hippies scratching their heads. “What are they supposed to do now, move to Calgary?” Kelly McParland has our pick for the funniest post of the year.

Peter J. Thompson/National Post<strong>By Charmaine Kerridge</strong>
Canadian director James Cameron <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110202/en_nm/us_hollywood_wealthy_2&quot; target="_blank">has snared the top spot on the list of the richest Hollywood earners</a> of 2010.
The mega success of Cameron’s 3-D hit <em>Avatar</em> helped name him the highest earner with second place going to <em>Pirates of the Caribbean </em>star Johnny Depp.
It’s estimated that Cameron earned US$257-million off of the US$1.95-billion worldwide gross of his money-making juggernaut, which he wrote, produced and directed.<!--more-->
Depp placed a distant second earning US$100-million for a slew of films he starred in including <em>The Tourist</em> and<em> Alice in Wonderland</em>. Director Stephen Spielberg rounded out the top three with US$80-million.
The youngest high-wage earners were <em>Twilight</em> stars 20-year-old Kristen Stewart at No. 13, and 24-year-old Robert Pattinson at No. 15.
The list was compiled by <em>Vanity Fair </em>magazine, which released its list of Hollywood’s Top 40 on Wednesday. The list included only actors and other creative types who earn money from films.

4. Outraged at Henry Kissinger’s cold-blooded comments about Jews on the most recently-released Nixon tape, Christopher Hitchens let loose with both barrels: “Here’s what should now happen, and let’s see if it does. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.”

3. Robyn Urback got to the bottom of a Facebook campaign that puzzled many with lascivious phrases seemingly left by friends and relatives. Turns out it was a campaign to raise awareness about breast cancer. What does “I like it on the couch” have to do with breast cancer? If you guessed absolutely nothing, you would be correct.

2. Toronto the Good was put to rest permanently with this year’s G20 summit. The government wasted billions on, among other things, a fake lake for reporters; police disregarded charter rights and rounded up protesters and onlookers alike; while business and tourism dried up in the heart of Canada’s largest city. Don Martin described the post-apocalyptic scene in downtown Toronto at the time.

1. Upon his release from prison after 28 months and 18 days, Conrad Black penned this account of the day he got out of jail. He also shared some valuable insights into the failure of the War on Drugs and the burgeoning prison industry in the United States.

From everyone at Full Comment, we wish you a happy new year and hope to see you again in 2011.

REUTERS/Hans Deryk PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — B.J. Upton had a pair of doubles and drove in two runs while Jeff Niemann tossed four scoreless innings and Tampa Bay rallied to defeat Toronto 4-3 on Omar Luna’s 11th-inning single Wednesday.
<!--more-->Upton’s second double accounted for the game’s first two runs in the fourth inning. The line drive to right-center eluded Toronto centre fielder Corey Patterson and rolled to the wall, driving in Evan Longoria and Matt Joyce.
After Niemann’s four-hit, two-strikeout performance, the Blue Jays struck for three runs against Dane De La Rosa in the fifth. Patterson drove in two runs with a triple, then scored on Yunel Escobar’s single.
The Rays tied the game in the bottom of the ninth on a John Jaso double, which drove in Luna. Luna won it in the 11th with an RBI single. Tampa Bay beat Toronto in 10 innings on Tuesday.
Brett Cecil went four innings for the Blue Jays, allowing three hits and two runs while striking out two. Alex Cobb (1-1) got the win. Luis Perez (0-1) took the loss.

Until the most recent release of the Nixon/Kissinger tapes, what were the permitted justifications for saying in advance that the slaughter of Jews in gas chambers by a hostile foreign dictatorship would not be “an American concern”? Let’s agree that we do not know. It didn’t seem all that probable that the question would come up. Or, at least, not all that likely that the statement would turn out to have been made, and calmly received, in the Oval Office. I was present at Madison Square Garden in 1985 when Louis Farrakhan warned the Jews to remember that “when [God] puts you in the ovens, you’re there forever,” but condemnation was swift and universal, and, in any case, Farrakhan’s tenure in the demented fringe was already a given.

Now, however, it seems we do know the excuses and the rationalizations. Here’s one, from David Harris of the American Jewish Committee: “Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question of where his loyalties lay.” And here’s another, from Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League: “The anti-Jewish prejudice which permeated the Nixon presidency and White House undoubtedly created an environment of intimidation for those who did not share the president’s bigotry. Dr. Kissinger was clearly not immune to that intimidation.” Want more? Under the heading, “A Defense of Kissinger, From Prominent Jews,” Mortimer Zuckerman, Kenneth Bialkin, and James Tisch wrote to the New York Times to say that “Mr. Kissinger consistently played a constructive role vis-à-vis Israel both as national security adviser and secretary of state, especially when the United States extended dramatic assistance to Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.” They asked that “the fuller Kissinger record should be remembered” and, for good measure, that “the critics of Mr. Kissinger should remember the context of his entire life.” Finally, Kissinger himself has favored us with the following: At that time in 1973, he reminds us, the Nixon administration was being pressed by Sens. Jacob Javits and Henry Jackson to link Soviet trade privileges to emigration rights for Russian Jews. “The conversation at issue arose not as a policy statement by me but in response to a request by the president that I should appeal to Sens. Javits and Jackson and explain why we thought their approach unwise.”

But Kissinger didn’t say something cold and Metternichian to the effect that Jewish interest should come second to détente. He deliberately said gas chambers! If we are going to lower our whole standard of condemnation for such talk (and it seems that we have somehow agreed to do so), then it cannot and must not be in response to contemptible pseudo-reasonings like these.

Let us take the statements in order. Harris and Foxman at least assume what we know for many other reasons to be true: Richard Nixon was a psychopathic anti-Semite. Is Kissinger so base as to accept their defense—that he was cringing before a Jew-baiter? Surely this, too, is “hurtful” to him (the revealing term he employs for reading criticism of his words rather than for their utterance)? He declines even to discuss the subject, though it has come up on countless previous Nixon tapes. The difference on this occasion is stark: The other recordings have Nixon giving vent to his dirty obsession while Kissinger makes fawning responses. This time, it is Kissinger who goes as far as any pick-nose anti-Semite can go. And Nixon doesn’t bother to grunt his approval. Not even he demanded so much of his eager toady. Of the Zuckerman-Bialkin-Tisch school of realpolitik, nothing much needs to be said. They refer to the “shock and dismay of some in the Jewish community”—as if only that community was entitled to shock or dismay—while quite omitting even the usual formality of expressing any disapproval of their own. To them, pre-approval of genocide, offered freely to a racist crook, is forgivable if the speaker is otherwise more or less uncritically pro-Israel. Add to this the other excuses of Jewish officialdom—that the pre-approval is also excusable when used to appease the evil mood swings of a criminal president—and you have the thesaurus of apologetics more or less complete. Kissinger’s own defense—that pre-approval of gas chambers was his thinking-aloud dress rehearsal for an “appeal to Sens. Javits and Jackson”—is of course unique to him.

So our culture has once again suffered a degradation by the need to explain away the career of this disgusting individual. And what if we did, indeed, accept the invitation to “remember the context of his entire life”? Here’s what we would find: the secret and illegal bombing of Indochina, explicitly timed and prolonged to suit the career prospects of Nixon and Kissinger. The pair’s open support for the Pakistani army’s 1971 genocide in Bangladesh, of the architect of which, Gen. Yahya Khan, Kissinger was able to say: “Yahya hasn’t had so much fun since the last Hindu massacre.” Kissinger’s long and warm personal relationship with the managers of other human abattoirs in Chile and Argentina, as well as his role in bringing them to power by the covert use of violence. The support and permission for the mass murder in East Timor, again personally guaranteed by Kissinger to his Indonesian clients. His public endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party’s sanguinary decision to clear Tiananmen Square in 1989. His advice to President Gerald Ford to refuse Alexander Solzhenitsyn an invitation to the White House (another favor, as with spitting on Soviet Jewry, to his friend Leonid Brezhnev). His decision to allow Saddam Hussein to slaughter the Kurds after promising them American support. His backing for a fascist coup in Cyprus in 1974 and then his defense of the brutal Turkish invasion of the island. His advice to the Israelis, at the beginning of the first intifada, to throw the press out of the West Bank and go for all-out repression. His view that ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia was something about which nothing could be done. Forget the criminal aspect here (or forget it if you can). All those policies were also political and diplomatic disasters.

We possess a remarkably complete record of all this, in and out of office, most of it based solidly on U.S. government documents. (The gloating over Bangladesh comes from July 19, 1971.) And it’s horribly interesting to note how often the cables and minutes show him displaying a definite relish for the business of murder and dictatorship, a heavy and nasty jokiness (foreign policy is not “a missionary activity“) that was by no means always directed, bad as that would have been, at gratifying his diseased and disordered boss. Every time American career diplomats in the field became sickened at the policy, which was not seldom, Kissinger was there to shower them with contempt or to have them silenced. The gas-chamber counselor is consistent with every other version of him that we have.

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.” — Henry Kissinger

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)The former No. 9-ranked tennis player and former Miss Universe have launched beauty products, diet supplements and a Bangkok restaurant together. They said in the statement they planned to continue to do business with one another.

Over the last few weeks, this modest little column of mine has been acquiring an almost eerie prescience and potency. I called for the death sentence on Tariq Aziz to be commuted, and it was only a matter of days before the president of Iraq announced that he would not sign Aziz’s death warrant. I called for Julian Assange to turn himself in, and he appeared at a London police station within hours of my words being published. Small stuff, you say. Show us something with a bit more heft and handle to it. All right, how’s this? In a November column, I denounced the shameful offer made by the Obama administration to the Netanyahu Cabinet in Israel and called for it to be withdrawn. And last week, in a wretched and furtive manner that befitted its original taint of bribery and corruption, withdrawn it was. How do you like that?

One of my main points in that article was the extent to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dependent on a coalition that gave important porfolios to political parties with insane ideologies. I instanced Israel Beitenu, the ultra-chauvinist group led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and the religiously orthodox Shas Party, under the spiritual leadership of deranged Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. “Fringe” though they might be, members of such groups hold key ministries, including the ones that dominate the “settlement” process. Since I last wrote about him, Rabbi Yosef has again been to the fore, blaming the calamitous forest fires in northern Israel on the failure of Jews to observe the Sabbath in the proper way. And the country’s interior minister, a Shas member named Eli Yishai, has rejected offers of fire-fighting equipment from Christian organizations, lest they use the opportunity to seduce Jews away to the worship of the Nazarene.

Men with this mentality were offered $3 billion worth of American aid, plus a full range of diplomatic support, in exchange for a one-month suspension of settlement-building, this non-freeze not even to include Jerusalem! And they rejected it as not good enough. It is difficult to say which is the worse national humiliation for the United States: the degraded initial offer or its contemptuous refusal. So I was thinking of demanding that the squalid bargain not be offered again. And then I decided that this would be a waste of a wish or a duplicate of a demand. So, while I am on a roll …

Here’s what should now happen, and let’s see if it does. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded. No more dinners in his honour; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last.

Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

(One has to love that uneasy afterthought….)

In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.

It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger — normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing — going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?

After I published my book calling for his indictment, many of Kissinger’s apologists said that, rough though his methods might have been, they were at least directed at defeating Communism. I never quite saw how the genocide in East Timor, say, had any effect in eroding the Berlin Wall. But I also pointed out that Kissinger did many favours for the heirs of Stalin and Mao: telling president Gerald Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House, for example, and making lavish excuses for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. He is that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism. It comes from a natural hatred of the democratic process, which he has done so much to subvert and undermine at home and abroad, and an instinctive affection for totalitarians of all stripes. True, full membership in this bestiary probably necessitates that you say something at least vicariously approving about the Final Solution. What’s striking about the Nixon tapes is that they show Kissinger managing this ugly feat without anyone even asking him. May my seasonal call be heeded: Let this character at last be treated like the reeking piece of ordure that he is.

Slate.com

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christopher-hitchens-latest-nixon-tape-buries-kissingers-reputation/feed0stdDoug Holyday: Porter's airport expansion is the right plan for OntarioHenry Kissinger